Elephant in the room [LWN.net]

Elephant in the room

Posted Mar 7, 2007 7:15 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413)
Parent article: Patent Fights Are a Legacy of MP3's Tangled Origins (NYTimes)

This issue of many patent-holders on mp3 has been studiously ignored by pretty much all players in the industry for around a decade. Unfortunately in the patent world, wishing and looking the other way isn't good enough, and the problem has only become entrenched.

Any organization with deep pockets who got involved with mp3 anyway either does not listen well enough to their own lawyers, or needs better lawyers. Indivuduals who plugged their ears and said "mp3 is out there, it can never be taken away" only entrenched the problem.

Media rights matter; content control and openness matter. Avoid formats with landmines embedded. This applies to Micorsoft as much as it does to you. Yeah software patents are terrible, but with this level of willful ignorance, you don't need software patents to land everyone in this much trouble.

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Elephant in the room

Posted Mar 11, 2007 20:54 UTC (Sun) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

Except, as an individual -- that is correct.

Mp3 is out there. And it really cannot realistically be "taken away".

I can convert mp3s to wavs on my Linux-machine today, and I'll be able to do the same in 1 year, 5 year or 50 years. Worst come to worst, it's a fairly simple exersize to write a decoder myself, did it twice in two different programing-languages, once as schoolwork, once for fun.

Law is efficient against the few and large with deep pockets. Using law to stop millions of individuals, each of which has small resources ain't very effective. Witness the less-than-stellar success of copyrigth-law at stopping individuals from copying, or the prohibition on alcohol and its sucess (or lack thereof!) in stopping people from brewing up a bit of wine or beer.